Does Amazon's DynamoDB SSD-based storage affected its design?

Question

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database, with features common to many others NoSQL databases. However, Amazon enforces that SSD devices are used as physical storage.

Does this only means that read and writes are faster because of SSD performance or there are any specific details native to DynamoDB that enhances its performance on SSD drives?

Answer 1

I suspect most of the performance gain is because the data lives on SSD drive and therefore is much faster to access. It's hard to say if there are specific implementation details of DynamoDB that enhance it's performance, but to the extent that writing code for a homogeneous hardware environment allows the implementation to take advantage of that specific environment so there may be some implementation details that help boost performance.

Perhaps the closest open source solution that can be compared to DynamoDB would be ASF's Cassandra NoSQL solution. I've found this discussion about the performance differences between SSD and HHD which may be helpful.

http://cassandra-user-incubator-apache-org.3065146.n2.nabble.com/SSD-vs-HDD-td5702930.html